A Night to Remember
CD-ROM for Mac/Windows
Voyager
Titanic: Adventure Out of Time
CD-ROM for Mac/Windows
CyberFlix
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deal: Name your new state-of-the-art ocean liner the Titanic, and on its
maiden voyage across the Atlantic it will hit an iceberg. The ship will sink in
about three hours, and out of 2,200 passengers, 1,500 will drown. It’ll become
one of the most famous disasters in history, inspiring movies, plays, books,
multimedia, web sites, the works. The capitalist thinks it over for a second
and says, “So what’s the down side?”
Eighty-five years after her fateful rendezvous with an iceberg off the coast
of Newfoundland on the calm, clear night of April 14, 1912, the Titanic
tragedy remains one of the biggest media events of all time. The story is
often remembered for many of the things that it wasn’t: It wasn’t the end of an
era. It didn’t happen because people thought the ship was unsinkable. The
Titanic was neither the fastest nor the most luxurious ocean liner of
her time. At the time she sailed, the Titanic was the biggest ship in
the world, but she would have held this title for only one month; German
passenger lines had already launched several larger vessels.
What the Titanic did accomplish was the creation of the biggest media
event of its type in modern history. It seized our imagination and became a
modern multimedia event, popularized in print, music and art. Every new
form of media has breathed additional life into the legend, spawning hundreds
of books, numerous plays, songs, movies, TV shows, documentaries, and, at last
count, at least 70 websites. It seems that every medium, old and new, loves the
Titanic, including CD-ROM.
Voyager specializes in publishing classy and literate CD-ROMs (previous titles
include Our Secret Century, The Beat Experience, and Who Built
America, to name a few). Their new Titanic title, A Night to
Remember, follows that tradition.
The two-disc package contains the entire 1958 British feature film, A Night
to Remember, produced by William MacQuitty and adapted from Walter Lord’s
excellent, true account of the tragedy. As of this writing, A Night to
Remember is still the best of many feature films and television versions of
the story. You can watch the film in quarter or half-screen, or switch on the
scene-by-scene commentary by Titanic experts Don Lynch and Ken
Marschall. Strangely enough, as the ship sinks and the passengers cling to
lifeboats or drown and the experts comment on everything from the credibility
of the actors to whether or not the film accurately depicts the amount of
bubbles the ship made on its way to the bottom, you get the eerie feeling that
you’re watching a real documentary film of the tragedy. There’s also a time
line, and a blueprint of the ship with links to scenes from the film (this is a
cool feature). And then there’s a bonus disk, with a documentary on the making
of the film, featuring interviews with producer William MacQuitty and author
Walter Lord.
Instead of exploring the history of the Titanic by revisiting
previously told versions, CyberFlix has completely reimagined the story for its
Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, by creating a digital 3-D version of the
ship and an interactive adventure game in which the player, as a British secret
agent, has the opportunity to alter the course of history. The high-resolution
graphics are often stunning and historically accurate, from the classic grand
staircase right down to the china patterns and wallpaper. The story is complex
and requires quite a bit of determination and brain power to puzzle out
(keeping a notepad handy for jotting down all the names of potential
co-conspirators and their cabin numbers, plus coded messages and other spy
stuff, doesn’t hurt).
There are numerous ways to get around the ship: You can take the elevator from
the forward grand staircase (and the punky elevator operator is always good for
clues and information), wander about the hallways and promenades, or jump decks
by clicking on linked locations on the blueprint. And, if you’re not in a
gaming mood, you can just take the virtual tour of the ship. Hints and clues
come from coded messages, intercepted telegrams, and various “talking-head”
characters — not all of whom are to be trusted.
With this game, CyberFlix has taken some of the approach used in last year’s
Dust: A Tale of the Wired West — character development, character
interaction, and a complicated story line — a few steps further. The idea of
character development is relative here, of course, and the characters’
costuming and dialogue could definitely stand an upgrade, but overall,
Titanic has a great sense of atmosphere, incredible attention to detail,
and — dare I say it? — a real sense of destiny.
The idea of going on a virtual cruise aboard the RMS Titanic has a lot
of synchronicities going for it. Mammoth ocean liners were among the crowning
achievements of the Industrial Revolution; not only were they the playthings of
the idle rich, but they served as vehicles of empowerment for millions of poor
immigrants by bringing them to America, the land of opportunity, for extremely
low fares. Now we’re marching in the Information Revolution, and the
hypemeisters tell us computers are supposed to be doing a lot of that
democratizing stuff for us. And did you buy a top-of-the-line (unsinkable) Mac
or PC (ocean liner) last year and watch it become hopelessly obsolete (sink)
while you were still paying off the interest on your charge card (in the middle
of the Atlantic)?
In the end, though, those things don’t really matter. What matters is that the
Titanic is a story that bears re-telling and re-examining, and the
current state of multimedia technology can help us do those things in new and
entertaining ways…
without fear of icebergs, pirates, or those nasty U-boats.
Jesse Sublett is a critically acclaimed mystery novelist and
screenwriter. He has scripted more than 25 documentary films, including The
Oceanliners for the series Great Ships and Nimitz and Yamamoto: High Noon on
the Pacific for the series Combat at Sea (both series can be seen on The
History Channel).
This article appears in January 24 • 1997 and January 24 • 1997 (Cover).